While the new year may have gotten off to a rocky start, our next movie has actually been one of the most genuinely enjoyable entries in this series.

When I began this series almost a year and a half ago, I felt I was pretty familiar with the “superhero movie format” that had come to inundate Hollywood since the 1990s. The characters and the superpowers may change, but the basic hero story of discovery and confrontation with evil seemed largely the same whether your dress up like a bat, spider, or anthropomorphic duck.

Part of the reason this whole experience has been so much fun for me is learning that this isn’t always necessarily the case. Sure, there are basic storytelling elements that almost have to be present in, say, an origin story. Rarely is a hero so well-known that you can just jump into the action without any set-up at all. But despite what critics of the genre may say Marvel’s best attempts to convince us otherwise, not all superhero movies are the same. If this series has taught me anything, it’s that there’s a good deal of variety in the way a hero’s story is told that adds depth to the superhero genre. And while superhero movie fervor will eventually run its course and they go the way of Westerns, I don’t think that’ll be happening any time soon.

This leads us into The Green Hornet. But first, a little background on our hero.

The original Hornet began life as a radio character in 1936, making him one of the earliest American superheroes. The Hornet was the alter-ego of Britt Reid, a wealthy publisher for The Daily Sentinel newspaper. By night he would don a green mask, green overcoat, green gloves, and green fedora to fight crime by posing as a criminal himself and leaving incriminating evidence for the police to later find and use. He didn’t do this alone, however. Always by his side was Kato, his masked partner, who acted as his bodyguard/enforcer as well as driver of their car, the Black Beauty. The duo’s subversive crime-fighting adventures delighted listeners throughout the 1930s and 50s. Aside from continuing comic stories, two movie serials were made in 1940 and 1941, as well as a live action TV show from 1966-67 and film from 1974 famously starring Van Williams as the Hornet and Bruce Lee as Kato.

Still, I feel like most Americans aren’t nearly as familiar with the Hornet and Kato as they are with other heroes, despite having existed for longer than the majority of the more well-known costumed crusaders. Even with Lee’s involvement in the 1966 show, “Green Hornet” seems to be one of those names that you throw out in lists of famous superheroes that make people say “Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard of him.” I think part of this might be due to the fact that Green Hornet isn’t a character owned by either DC or Marvel, and thus hasn’t had the same amount of financial backing as other heroes who have since become much more mainstream. He is also a more old-fashioned superhero, not only in his costuming but in his adventures. You expect him and Kato to be spoken of in the same sentence as Dick Tracy or the original Batman. Their adventures exposing crime and coming to blows with mobsters really are of a different time. That doesn’t mean their characters can’t evolve, of course; one needs only look to Batman for evidence of that. I even think the more grounded nature of his character works in his favor amid the quasi-mythical figures that Marvel and DC have at their disposal. It can be refreshing to take a break from the battles of gods and super men and instead enjoy a more plausible if still over-the-top story once in a while.

So now let me remind you of the superhero movie landscape in which this old-timey character was reborn. The year was 2011. Movie-going Americans were firmly invested in the possibility of good (if mostly predictable) superhero movies. Both Iron Man and The Dark Knight had been released to near universal acclaim three years previously. Spider-Man was a household name again. Both Captain America and Thor were released that year, and with the MCU in full swing we were only a year away from the seminal superhero event that is The Avengers. Amid these iconic stories of aliens, gods, magic and super technology, The Green Hornet appeared.

As I picked up the DVD I had gotten from the used bookstore and popped it into my Xbox to watch, I remembered that I had gone to see this in theaters with my friends in college. Aside from that, however, I didn’t recall much of anything about the film. I initially took that as a bad sign. After all, if I couldn’t remember the plot or the villain, how good could it possibly be? It turns out that those lowered expectations were a blessing in disguise, since they allowed me to view the movie as if for the first time.

Largely, the story of this version follows the source material from the 1930s. Seth Rogan plays Britt Reid, who is the son of the owner of The Daily Sentinel. He is the epitome of the arrogant, spoiled millionaire playboy that Christian Bale’s Batman barely hints at in his films. When Reid inherits his father’s newspaper, he befriends one of his father’s servants, Kato. Kato reveals that he is both a supreme martial artist as well as a visionary mechanic. Reid then comes up with the idea of fighting crime with Kato by posing as criminals themselves, and uses his influence as newspaper editor to inflate the public profile of his new alter ego, the Green Hornet. Pretty standard superhero origin story.

But if the Green Hornet is a departure from the “super” aspect of superheroes of today in his grounded and old-timey-ness, then The Green Hornet is a welcome departure from the superhero films that immediately preceded and followed it. This is due largely in part to the involvement of comedian Seth Rogan, both as the star of the film and one of the co-writers of the script. In fact, I would categorize this movie not as a “superhero movie with Seth Rogan,” but as a “Seth Rogan comedy about superheroes.” It has much more in common with Superbad, The Interview, and Pineapple Express (all at least also partially written by Rogan) than it does with Spider-Man or Iron Man. Even the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, notable for their relatively irreverent humor and tone in the MCU, are still at their heart superhero movies first and comedies second. The Green Hornet really is its own animal in a sea of similarity, much like the hero himself has been.

This movie actually did make me laugh out loud throughout the runtime, and in a different way than the MCU’s brand of humor. While Guardians and Robert Downey, Jr.’s performances as Tony Stark are full of quippy one-liners and the occasional slapstick moments, Green Hornet’s humor was more akin to one of Rogan’s other comedies both as a writer and as an actor. The unexpectedness of such humor in a superhero film made it that much funnier for me. It may not be the funniest movie ever made, but the moments of levity help to contrast with the criminal violence which is also present here. There are a couple of good action sequences, as well as a well-done car chase through the street of L.A.

And Rogan is not the only funny man in this movie. Rogan’s costar, Jay Chou, mostly functions as a straight man to Rogan’s antics. It is interesting to see a superhero-sidekick relationship between two peers instead of a hero and his young ward. Kato is the real brains behind the operation, with the Hornet mostly being the money to fund Kato’s genius. This being a Rogan-style movie, the Hornet’s incompetence and substance-less bravado is dialed up to 11, making Kato look even better in comparison.

Chou’s martial arts acting is impressive as well, paying respect to the role Bruce Lee portrayed close to 30 years prior.

The villain of the movie, played by Christoph Waltz, is Eastern European gangster Benjamin Chudnofsky. Chudnofsky is an older criminal who is constantly worried about his appearance in the L.A. underworld, specifically why no one seems to fear him like they used to. The ways in which his criminal activities intersect with his insecurities are hilarious, giving the movie a villain who isn’t on par with a Thanos or a Joker, but who also isn’t a one-dimensional bad guy.

Cameron Diaz is also here as the love interest for the Hornet and Kato. Her character is the most competent of the trio, as she unwittingly gives the Hornet ideas for what a criminal should do by providing a psychological analysis of the Hornet to Reid, her boss. To her credit, she isn’t aware of Reid’s identity while helping him, which I guess makes her contribution to his heroic antics even more impressive. But while she contributes much more to the plot of her superhero movie than, say, a Mary Jane or Lois Lane, she’s still more of a secondary character in a boys’ movie, which is a shame.

Overall, Green Hornet was really enjoyable to me. Considering the number of movies in our series that I have enjoyed more in a “it’s dumb but I still like it” kind of way, it really is refreshing for a movie to make me laugh intentionally instead of because it was kind of dumb. And I’m not the only one who thought so. While many critics poo-pooed the movie as being a rather dumb superhero movie (as if a Seth Rogan superhero movie would be anything else), the movie actually made the studio a fair amount of money. Unfortunately, it was not enough to warrant a sequel:

Producer Neal Moritz said in March 2012 that no sequel would be forthcoming since the movie “did almost $250 million and was actually very well liked, but we made the movie for too much money. One, we made it in L.A. for certain reasons, and two, we decided to go to 3D—that added another $10 million. If I had done it in a tax-rebate state and not done 3D, it would have been considered a huge financial success for the studio. So we’re not making a sequel right now.”

Since I didn’t watch it in 3D, I can’t really comment on whether it enhances the movie or not. Based on my experience of being charged more to see movies jump out at me, however, I would guess it probably doesn’t.

Then again, gimmicky scams have duped me before.

So I’d like to end the review here and encourage you to watch this movie for yourself. While there is more I could say about this one, I feel that the best way to experience this particular movie is to watch it for yourself instead of hearing about it from me. Like I said, I’m really glad I had largely forgotten this movie so I could experience it as if for the first time. All the jokes and twists were pleasantly surprising. And although Seth Rogan himself has said that the movie was “a fucking nightmare” to make, I’m glad he did it. With 2021 starting the way it has, I think we could all stand to take 119 minutes to let Seth Rogan’s hyucking laugh tell his version of the superhero story.

Next time, we will come to the end of our movie list, saving arguably the most infamous entry for last: Ryan Reynolds’ disastrous Green Lantern.